Study
| EST. READ TIME 1 MIN.Official Language Policies of the Canadian Provinces: Costs and Benefits in 2006
This study examines the costs and benefits of the official language policies of the 10 Canadian provinces and calculates how much each province spends on providing services in French to a francophone minority. In Quebec?s case, the report looked at the cost of providing services in English to the anglophone minority.
The study is a complement to Official Language Policies at the Federal Level in Canada, a study of the costs and benefits of the federal government?s official language policies, published by the Fraser Institute in 2009 (Vaillancourt and Coche, 2009). Official Language Policies of the Canadian Provinces focuses on the costs and benefits of the official language policies in 2006 as there is no evidence of any significant change in the provincial policies towards official minorities since then.
The first chapter presents some statistics on official language minorities and explains the constitutional dimension of the question and the methodology used to calculate costs. The following chapters present the situation in the ten provinces.
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François Vaillancourt
François Vaillancourt is an emeritus professor in the department of economic sciences at the University of Montreal where he taughtfrom 1976 to 2011. He completed his Ph.D. in economics at Queen’s University in 1978 and received a Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Geneva in 2021 for his pioneering work in the economics of language. Professor Vaillancourt was a Fulbright scholar in 2007 in Atlanta and was elected to the Royal Society of Canada in 2009. He was the Shastri lecturer in India has been a guest lecturer at the University of Toronto and Australian National University and a research scholar at the Institute for Research in Public Policy (1992-2000) and the C.D. Howe Institute (2000-2003). Professor Vaillancourt was also a research coordinator(Income distribution and Income security) for the MacDonald Commission (1983-1986). He has consulted for a number of international organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank, OECD, UNDP and national agencies such as Statistics Canada, Finance Canada, and the Seguin Commission. His fields of research include linguistic policies, intergovernmental financial relations, and tax compliance costs. He has published on a wide variety of issues including equalization in federal countries, education, minority language policies, federalism, and taxation. Professor Vaillancourt is widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent scholars on the issue of tax compliance and administrative costs.… Read more -
Olivier Coche
Olivier Coche holds a B.Sc. in economics and politics from the Unversité de Montréal. He is currently studying law atthe Unversité de Montréal. He has worked as a research assistant on the Fraser-initiated research project on Canadian language policies since summer 2008.… Read more -
Marc-Antoine Cadieux
Marc-Antoine Cadieux holds a B.Sc. in economics and political science from the Université de Montréal and an M.P.A. from the Université Laval. -
Jamie Lee Ronson
Jamie Lee Ronson holds a B.Sc. in economics and political science and a M.Sc. in economics from the Université de Montréal.